Re: Ada News Brief - 96-05-24.txt [1/1]

[rogoff@sccm.Stanford.EDU (Brian Rogoff)]

stt@henning.camb.inmet.com (Tucker Taft) writes:
   AdaIC (adainfo@sw-eng.falls-church.va.us) wrote:
   : Ada News Brief
   : Week Ending: May 24, 1996

   : ... Tucker Taft, chief scientist of Intermetrics, Inc., 
   : stated, "Of course they would love to see Java as the next 
   : Ada in DoD. It's a lot of hype. 
		 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^  This is either a misquote,
   or taken out of context.  I am a fan of Java, and I don't think it
   is just a lot of hype.

But the statement that Java will replace Ada (or C++) in all applications 
is probably hype, right? That is how I read that response.

   Be that as it may, I do believe Ada has a number of 
   advantages, particularly with respect to the thoroughness 
   of the compile-time checking provided by Ada (e.g.  strong type 
   distinctions between numeric types, enumeration types, array types, 
   etc.).  For example, Java treats all "int"s as freely interconvertible,
   and has no separate concept of an enumeration type.  This means that a
   Java interface communicates less information than an Ada interface, both
   to the reader, and to the compiler.

Ada has a number of advantages in "close to the metal" programming as well.

   The great thing about the Ada/Java combination is that we get the
   best of both worlds, getting the robust consistency checking, generic 
   templates, enumeration types, etc., from the Ada side, while also 
   getting garbage collection, dynamic linking, Web-browser integration, etc.
   from the Java side.

I guess you mean that you like the JVM, and not the Java language.

There is a proposal from MIT to add parametrized types to Java. It was posted 
in the Java newsgroup recently. They also talk about adding iterators, 
closures, and a few more goodies. I think those additions would go a long 
way towards closing the gap with Ada, Eiffel, and other languages. 

-- Brian